She is a healer gifted with the fire of the stars in her hands, a shape-shifting shaman, a former Roman whore and yet a priestess of Isis. And, oh yes, at one time she was married to a troublemaking man she adored named Esus, from Galilee.

And she was a great friend of his mother and Mary of Bethany.

She is Maeve Rhuad, redheaded and razor-tongued, raised by nine witches and named after the mother of all Celtic warrior-queens. To top it off, she is the mother of two daughters: Sarah, a runaway turned pirate whom she conceived with Esus; and Boudica, fiercely fighting queen of the Iceni Celts of Pretannia, daughter by rape by her archdruid father, for whom, in the autumn of her life, Maeve has decided to search.

In this, the final volume of the epic four-novel series she calls “The Maeve Chronicles,” author Elizabeth Cunningham cleverly crafts a fitting series of conflicts that take Maeve on the ultimate adventure of her already extraordinary life. That pilgrim journey takes her from Gaul to what is now Britain, and ultimately beyond to the blessed isles of the west, on a brave little boat.

In the earlier novels in this chronicle, Cunningham dramatizes Maeve's expulsion from Mona for saving young Esus from a trumped-up ritual sacrifice — devised by her father once he discovered their liaison — as the principal identity-defining event of her young life.

Now, after having Maeve witness the trauma of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, and survive the agony of raising Sarah in isolation for years only to have her run away, Cunningham casts Maeve as a tough crone determined to tie up the loose ends of her life.

From her erotic encounters with Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, military governor of Pretannia, to her visions of a horrible battle she endeavors at all costs to prevent, to her dramatic return to the druids in full regalia amid the bonfires of Samhain, to her final discovery of Queen Boudica and one of her granddaughters in an impoverished community compound devoid of young males, Cunningham makes this return journey at once exciting and full of foreboding.